Tag: random

Passive aggressive spam

- Stacy 2 Comments

I was just checking my spam filter, as I occasionally do, to be sure that I haven’t overlooked some real people making real comments. Some of these bots are getting to be nearly indistinguishable from real people if you weren’t really paying attention to the URL attached to the comment and weren’t that great at English to begin with. But sometimes they’re just a work of passive aggressive art, and I thought you’d get a kick out of the best specimen or two.

I haven’t checked in here for some time because I thought it was getting boring, but the last several posts are great quality so I guess I’ll add you back to my daily bloglist. You deserve it my friend :)

I love how I “deserve” their attention now that I’m no longer boring.

Exactly. I imagine it is. Very good stuff, I agree totally.

Exactly what “it” is this spammer is agreeing totally with, I have no idea. But they think I’m dumb enough to approve their comment so they can link to a spammer directory.

The one below that was a comment telling me that Apple was much preferable to the Zune… which Microsoft killed how long ago??

And in the “flattery will get you nowhere, especially when you make no sense” category:

Im a huge fan already, man. Youve accomplished a brilliant job generating positive that people have an understanding of where youre coming from. And let me let you know, I get it. Excellent stuff and I cant wait to read extra of one’s blogs. What youve got to say is significant and needs to be read.

And, of all things, a new one is trying to tell me they posted certain posts on Reddit! Really?

By the way, the new version of WordPress has a nice preview feature when you hover over a URL in the spam filter, so you don’t have to click on the link and worry about infecting your computer with a virus or something. VERY nice feature, WP!

Foxy

- Stacy 2 Comments

A friend shared this article with me recently, delving into a decades-long experiment trying to recreate the domestication of pets in foxes—and succeeding, faster than they had anticipated. I found it fascinating, especially because I’d just recently seen something about the discovery of a burial site that dates back to before pets were domesticated, and foxes were buried with all the care that a family member might be along with their owners. It  makes me wonder why they gave up on domesticating foxes if they are capable of being domesticated. The article I read posited that foxes could only be domesticated up to a point, which would have explained why people turned to wolves.

Now I can’t find the original article to link, though. But here’s a Time article that covers the same thing.

Absentee blogger

- Stacy

I’ve been rather absentee from the blog lately. I’ve been working on a number of things–catching up on critiques (for those waiting, thanks for your patience), finding a day job (paying the bills is a good thing!), apartment hunting and then rearranging my apartment to allow for a roommate, and a few other things. I don’t like to talk much about any of those things in detail on the blog–I have tweeted some about some of them, but not much–so I’ve been quiet here and bordering on inane on Twitter/Facebook.

None of those things have been resolved quite yet, either, so I’m probably going to continue to be quiet here for a while. It’s all I can do to just try to get everything done in a day, and then in the evenings I tend to be watching TV or doing similar things to decompress, which is what I’ve been tweeting about recently.

I did read Catching Fire as one of those decompression activities, though, and perhaps later this week I’ll post a review of it, if I get the time. Hopefully by mid-September things will have settled down a bit and I’ll have some news for you.

Busy is good, but bad hair days are the pits

- Stacy 2 Comments

I’ve been busy finishing an edit for an author, working on a proofread, and getting submission packet critiques back to the authors who have been waiting for them for what probably feels like an inordinate amount of time. If you’re waiting on me for a critique, hopefully I’ll be catching up to you in the queue soon. It’s been so good to have work to be busy with — the bills are actually getting paid this month! If you’re a freelancer, you know what I mean — you start to panic when the workload starts to decrease, because who knows whether it will increase again?

But I’m taking a break this evening. I have a confession: A few nights ago, I got it into my head that if I just trimmed up the little wisps on my hair around my face, I wouldn’t have to dip into my meager funds to pay for a haircut. I mean, I’d rather pay the power bill and have groceries, you know? But the scissors slipped, and I ended up trying to even it out, and… well, awful story short, I think I have given myself a mullet. It’s bad, guys.

So I’m off in a few hours to go have someone fix it — and yes, I’m paying for it, don’t worry. It’s going to probably end up pretty short. Which is *really* scary for me, because short hair on me usually just emphasizes how much weight I’ve gained in my adulthood. I’ve picked out a few pictures off the internet that might work, but those pictures are always of really skinny models and I’m just not sure how they’ll look *on me*, and I want as professional and modern a look as possible.

If you have any ideas for cute short hair, especially medium-length hair that’s relatively short in the front (here’s an example of what I mean by that, or perhaps the one on the right here), by all means, please give me a link in the comments (but do it by 4:30 MST, because I’m heading out to get it all chopped off after that).